PNNL

Abstract

While international nonproliferation and arms control verification capabilities have their foundations in physical and chemical sensors, state declarations, and on-site inspections, verification experts are beginning to consider the importance of open source data to complement and support traditional means of verification. One of those new, and increasingly expanding, sources of open source information is social media, which can be ingested and understood through social media analytics (SMA). Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is conducting research to further our ability to identify, visualize, and fuse social media data to support nonproliferation and arms control treaty verification efforts. This paper will describe our preliminary research to examine social media signatures of nonproliferation or arms control proxy events. We will describe the development of our preliminary nonproliferation and arms control proxy events, outline our initial findings, and propose ideas for future work.